Welcome to Las Vegas! My name is Victor H. Royer, but everyone just calls me Vegas Vic. I was named after that famous neon sign in Downtown Las Vegas, that cowboy with the hat on top of the Pioneer Club, always waving his hand and beckoning to his long love, Sassy Sally, on the other side of the street. I will be writing a few articles for AccessVegas.com, so I hope you enjoy them.

Playing Internet Tournaments — Part 3 — Sit-n-Go

The other alternatives are the very popular Sit-n-Go tournaments. These take the form and structure of usually only one table tournaments, which in the game of Texas Hold’Em will mean a table of 10 players, and that is all that there will be for that tournament. This is the same structure that is usually used in the brick-and-mortar casino poker rooms and card rooms for satellite tournaments, usually referred to as one table satellites. These are also offered on the Internet in precisely the Sit-n-Go format, and they also can qualify players to other tournaments, including many of the land-based tournaments on the WPT and WSOP circuits.

Such tournaments and single-table satellites are also used on the Internet, as well as in land-based casinos, to qualify players to other tournaments that are perhaps run either on that Internet site, or at that particular casino poker room or card room. However, most of the time the Internet the Sit-n-Go tournaments are just that, one table tournaments where only those players compete against each other, and usually the top three share the price pool. In the real world, almost all such tournaments are usually single-table satellites, where only the winner is qualified to enter the subsequent qualifying event. I will have more to say about such multitable and Sit-n-Go tournaments in the next chapter. For now, also be aware of the fact that Sit-n-Go tournaments on the Internet are not necessarily limited to only one table.

There are also what is called the multitable Sit-n-Go’s, and this simply means that there are more than one table playing tournaments in the Sit-n-Go format. There could be two tables, three tables, or as many as that particular poker site chooses to offer. Most of the time, however, such Sit-n-Go multitable tournaments are limited to no more than four tables. The reason for that is very simple, and that is that it would take much too much time for the registered players to sit there and wait until the entire field of 40 players sits at the tables. This is because the Sit-n-Go format is precisely that, and that is that you sit at the table, and go when every one of the available positions has been filled by another player sitting down and buying in. Once all the available positions at such Sit-n-Go tournaments are filled, the tournament starts immediately.

Therefore, if you are going to play in a multitable Sit-n-Go tournament, it is usually to your benefit to select a game and a limit that will attract players quickly, because otherwise you could be sitting there for quite awhile before players will actually join your table and the tournament can start. Nevertheless, these Sit-n-Go tournaments are wonderful to practice your tournament playing skills, and when you join a one-table Sit-n-Go tournament in particular you can use this to practice your final table play.

They can not only be quite profitable, especially in the higher buy-ins, but they are also beneficial because they don’t take that long to complete, you don’t have to wait for a prespecified start time, and you can use them to help you practice a multitude of your tournament playing skills. Personally, I enjoy playing Sit-n-Go tournaments in the one table formats because you can usually play several of them, and even if you happen to be knocked out of one, there’s always another you can join immediately thereafter. Also, if you are so able to do this, you can quite often play several Sit-n-Go tournaments at the same time. Although I personally do not like to do that, because I prefer to concentrate more on the game in which I’m actually involved, such Sit-n-Go tournaments are exceptionally good at allowing you to practice certain skills and plays that you would not necessarily want to try when you are playing in a multitable tournament format.

Such are the many benefits of Internet poker tournaments, because you can usually find such Sit-n-Go tournaments as well as multitable tournaments with sufficiently low buy-ins to allow you to enter them frequently, and as a consequence practice a great many of the skills that you can then use to successfully transition into some of the land-based tournaments. In recent times, there have been many well-known and now recognizable players in the real world tournament poker circuits who have done precisely that, by first learning to play on the Internet, and then successfully transitioning to these major land-based tournaments.

Victor H. Royer, known as Vegas Vic, is the author of 42 books. Mostly known for books, articles, and columns on casino games and gambling, he is also the author of New Casino Slots, Great Gamblers: True Stories and Amazing Facts, The Great American Joke Book, as well as his works of Fiction, which include: Another Day, and the Western: Riders on the Wind. Versatile and multitalented, Royer is the creator, producer, and host of the Web-TV show Great Casino Slots, now showing at www.LasVegasLiveTV.com. He also composes music and performs under the names Glenn Diamond, Pappy Jones, Hans Dorfmann, and Miguel Armandaiz. For more information, please visit him at www.MoreCasinoDeals.com and www.GamingAuthor.com. Sign up for the Insider Advantage Newsletter at: http://www.accessvegas.com/membership

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